Poetry · A way to begin
Lum Lumi
Not translated into English
Ali Podrimja · 1982
Synopsis
A collection written after the death of the poet's young son, Lumi, and dedicated to his memory. Grief opens in it a meditation on being: solitude, fear, death and fate. The poems are brief, compact, with direct images and discreet rhymes, and the title repeats the child's name in its simple form and then in its Albanian definite form.
Context
The collection appeared in Pristina in 1982, after nine others, the first of which dated from 1961. Robert Elsie sees in it the turning point of his work and of contemporary Kosovar poetry, which takes on an existential anxiety there. Podrimja's verse is laconic: unexpected metaphors, unusual syntax, barely audible rhymes. His poems have appeared in French in Alexandre Zotos's translations, but not this book.
Who it is for
Short poems in Albanian, with no French translation of the collection; Alexandre Zotos's selections offer a way into the author.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as his masterpiece and as a turning point in the letters of Kosovo; Robert Elsie calls it masterly.